Northwest Issues.

The Corporate Minefield

Female Execs Learn To Tiptoe Around Wives

Successful Women Find Spouses Often Threatened

February 21, 1993|By Stories by Mary Beth Sammons.

For the past 15 years, Cheryl Nordstedt has, with great trepidation, steeled herself for her trade association's annual out-of-town convention. Inevitably, the same scenario occurs, and Nordstedt finds herself slipping away from the dinner table early to the solitude of her hotel room. Often, she dines alone.

It's not because Nordstedt is antisocial. Rather, as one of few females traveling with the management team, she feels "a little uncomfortable" among the predominantly male executives and their spouses, not to mention the mostly male member physicians and their wives.

"The men are always going to great lengths to say, `This is Cheryl, you know the one I always talk about,' over and over," explains Nordstedt, director of meetings and conventions for the Schaumburg-based American Academy of Dermatology. "If I were the spouse, I might be a little uptight meeting this woman who my husband spends so much time at work with."

Nordstedt is single, a fact that only serves to accentuate the uneasiness that hangs in the air like stale smoke, seeming to choke all attempts at conversation.

Says Nordstedt: "I always try to make the appropriate social chitchat. But it's real real hard sometimes, because (the wives') lives are so different than mine. I just sometimes try to bow out of the picture."

Nordstedt is not alone. Her travel/dining dilemma underscores a growing, increasingly sensitive and sometimes controversial phenomenon facing female executives: How to deal with corporate wives.

"Corporate wives can feel very threatened by the existence of this executive female, no matter if she is available or unavailable," says Debra Benton, president of the Ft. Collins, Colo., Benton Management Resources, who counsels executives from Fortune 500 companies throughout the world in leadership and personal skills. Companies she works with locally include United Airlines in Elk Grove Village, AT&T in Chicago, Sara Lee in Deerfield and Citicorp in Chicago, along with dozens of trade and professional organizations.

"It's just the fact that this successful, dynamic woman, someone who in many cases spends more time with their husbands than they do, is there at all," she says. "All they've heard is these great things about this female co-worker."

Indeed, annual meetings, conventions and holiday parties often bring this thorny situation to the forefront, according to Benton, because it is at these occasions that the female executive and the corporate wife often are meeting for the first time or after a lengthy separation. Benton, author of "Lions Don't Need to Roar: Using the Leadership Power of Professional Presence to Stand Out, Fit In and Move Ahead" (Warner Books, $19.95), recently was in Chicago on a nationwide promotion tour for the book.

"It's often the fear of the unknown," said Benton, who is quick to add that it is an insecurity magnified by society, particularly television's portrayal of the corporate woman. "On TV, corporate women are portrayed as these barracudas who will do anything and everything to get what they want. If a corporate wife doesn't work, she may feel that pressure that she doesn't have a fufilling life and feel very threatened by her husband's female co-worker. And it's a double-edged sword if she does work, because she's out there in the corporate world and she knows that office romance does go on."

Either way, employed or not, "the reality is corporate wives feel threatened by their husband's female peers," says Marilyn Moats Kennedy, managing partner for Career Strategies in Wilmette and columnist for Glamour magazine.

"This is one of those very sensitive issues in the workforce even though it is hard to believe it exists in corporate America today," says Kennedy. "The worst part is that the corporate wives are on the defensive from the minute the meeting starts. The executive female doesn't have to say a word and she has already lost the battle."

What's more, both Benton and Kennedy agree this delicate relationship between the corporate (or industry, education, private organization etc. upper-echelon executive) wife and female co-worker can have a detrimental effect on the female executive's career path.

"The wives have more influence than you think on their husband's business," says Benton.

Adds Kennedy: "No doubt about it, what a female executive says and how she handles herself at these meetings can be vital to her career."

Just ask Donna McMahon of Palatine, the director of conventions and advertising for the Des Plaines-based Professional Photographer's Association of America. A former corporate wife who did what she describes as the "just-the-wife thing," traveling with her first husband to conventions and annual meetings, McMahon has sat on both sides of the fence, or business meeting dinner table, if you will.